A Means to the End

But what were the means whereby people like Samuel Parris, Thomas Putnam, Dr. William Griggs, and others could have caused the symptoms of witchcraft? In his sermon of March 27, 1691/2, Samuel Parris had taken as his text John 6.70, “Have not I chosen you twelve, & one of you is a devil” (Sermon Notebook 194). In this sermon, written on the occasion of the public examination of the “shee-witches” Rebecca Nurse, a church member of Salem Town, who often attended church at the Village, and Martha Corey, a member of his own church, Parris declared, “Christ knows how many devils there are in His Churches.” In his sermon Parris chose also to expound upon another verse of Scripture, this time alluding to Jesus’s parable of the tares in Matthew 13. 38-43. Jesus interprets for the crowds the symbolism of the weeds among the good crops:

The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one; The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the

angels. As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of the world. (Matt. 13. 38-40)

Parris adds, “The Church consists of good; & bad: as a Garden that has weeds as well as flowers & as a field that has Wheat as well as Tares” (196). He then alludes to the passage in Jeremiah 24.1-4, the parable of the figs, which compares a bowl of good figs at the peak of ripeness to evil figs in another bowl, which cannot be eaten. One bowl represented the saved remnant, the other the damned. Parris’s extensive use of plant imagery—perhaps disguising veiled threats—is interesting.

A reductively literal reading of this passage might suggest that the devil is responsible for the weeds that choke the fields while Christ sows the seed for the good edible corn. Certainly, this passage of Scripture might be partially responsible for Satan’s (and witches’) traditional association with noisome plants, since witches were considered foremost among those of the devil’s party. Since Parris associated the weeds among the field of good corn with the lost in their midst, he might have extrapolated from this passage of Scripture the message that literal weeds were the just desserts of literal sinners—especially sinners who opposed him. All were of the devil. Most likely, Parris chose to highlight the parable of the tares because it reflected his own recently acquired experience in handling tares. Some of the afflicted girls could also be considered “weeds.” Mercy Lewis, Mary Warren, and Elizabeth Hubbard were orphaned servants. Lewis’s parents had been killed in an Indian attack in Falmouth, Maine. Abigail

Williams’s exact relationship with the family of the Rev. Samuel Parris is unknown. All the core afflicted accusers were girls and women in subservient positions.

Parris’s attitude toward what sinners deserved—sinners, of course defined as the people who opposed him—could have been much like the derisive attitude expressed by Mercy Short toward the later executed witch Sarah Good as early as June, 1692. Good was jailed in Boston on suspicion of witchcraft, and when Mercy Short was sent by her mistress to the prison on an errand, she encountered the accused witch Sarah Good of Salem Village, who asked her for a little tobacco. Picking up a handful of wood shavings, Short threw them at her, saying, “That’s tobacco enough for you” (Mather, C. “A Brand

Pluck’d Out of the Burning” in Burr Narratives 259-260). Mercy Short immediately after came down with fits similar to those of the Salem girls.

The devil was responsible both for rendering men sinful and the resultant curse of the springing up of thorns and thistles in the Garden of Eden. Sin entered the world and men and women had to till the ground and eat of the herb of the field instead of the fruits of Eden. Cultivating and eating of the herbs of the field was associated with the fall, and weeds represented a further division from edible fruit. Since Christ associated weeds with sinners and with the devil, weeds of the field were paired in Parris’s mind with human weeds, the damned, especially the witches who willingly and knowingly associated with Satan. Following the example of Jesus, who at the last supper referred to Judas as a “devil,” Parris, as evident in his sermon of March 27, had ceased to make a distinction between devils as evil supernatural beings, witches, and ordinary sinful people who routinely did evil (Hill 102). Since both types of weeds belonged together, Parris might have reasoned, at least subconsciously, that the use of such weeds would be “good enough” for exposing and purging Satan’s “weeds” from his church. Just as terrorist leaders use suicide bombers to launch their explosives (purportedly for a divine purpose), and just as cigarette companies use cigarettes as delivery systems for nicotine, for Parris, Putnam, and Griggs, the girls in their charge could also be used as delivery systems to root out the tares from their midst. They would harvest the tares using a blunt

instrument—a witch hunt—fighting fire with fire. Naturally, a few grains of wheat might fall in with the tares. To use a noxious weed for such a purpose would only fit the use that God had ordained by sprouting them from the ground Adam and Eve had to till. Sarah

Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba and been the “weeds” in a sense, the targets of the conspirators’ delivery system. To purge the weeds from their midst might be necessary to feed the weeds of the field to the weeds of the community, the devils who opposed him. That would only be giving them a taste of their own medicine, using traditional methods of witches as “Poysoners” against the devils in his church. Parris and his co-conspirators would cast out the devil with Beelzebub. The weeds of the field (the nightshade that grew in the corn fields) would be harvested for use against the weeds of the community who opposed Parris and his church. Both would eventually be burned together in the fire. Like a fanatical terrorist, Parris might have thought it was just to expose the human weeds to the noxious weeds working through the bodies and minds of their human though

relatively innocent delivery systems to oppose and destroy the evil working against him. Parris, Putnam, and Griggs could have begun accusing others themselves, but that would have seemed too obvious and proved too unwieldy. It was safer and more efficient to have servants help harvest the tares for them. It was far preferable to use the servants who had lost their parents in the Indian wars, daughters, nieces, and even wives. People would sympathize with their afflictions. There would be a natural inclination among influential males to pity and not question too harshly the young female accusers. How could these men get the women in their households to go along with their scheme? By leaving them in blissful ignorance. But if the women were not told of this scheme, how would they be expected to make accusations? They would make accusations if they thought they were bewitched. But how could a daughter, a niece, a female servant or slave be made to believe she is bewitched?

They could be subjected to the type of torments people have had in the past who have been known to have been possessed. The fits could then be blamed on witchcraft. What would bring on such fits? Was there a drug of some kind that would mimic the symptoms of bewitchment, some herbal preparation that would cause fits and delusions, make people passive instruments, and cause hallucinations of sights and sounds of ghosts and demons that could then be blamed on witchcraft?

On May 8, Parris records the text from which he took his sermon. Parris’s text, taken from 1 Corinthians 10.21 reads, “Ye Cannot drink the Cup of the Lord, & the Cup of Devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table, & of the Table of Devils” (Sermon Notebook 199). It was as if to say that if you don’t partake of the Lord’s table (read, if you don’t support me), then you must be partakers of the devil’s table (you risk receiving the contents of the chalice and bread of the devil in the form of accusations of the

afflicted brought about by the devil’s potions. Those who supported Parris had nothing to worry about. Those who didn’t, however, could fear the devil’s wrath in the form of witchcraft accusations fomented by a true witches’ brew.

The ingredients for such a concoction were known to exist. There was a plant that Indians used to bewitch their young boys, one that made them see and talk with the devil. But could anyone be made to take the drug without their knowledge? Easily: a powder could be ground from the seeds, dried leaves, or roots of this plant and hidden in bread, drinks, sauce, gravy, and other foods. A tincture, infusion, or decoction could be made and added, undetected, to a drink like cider. Not only could it be done, it had been done

countless times. Poisons were easily hidden in the days before modern forensics. People had done such things for centuries (See Muller).

But where would Parris find such a plant? The answer is startling: perhaps in his back yard. Such a plant grows in all 48 of the contiguous United States. Before leaving the subject of Parris’s plant imagery and its relevance to the situation in Salem Village we should note that the prevalence of infestation of a plant known as jimson weed in corn fields in the United States. Jimson weed (short for Jamestown weed) is found be as prevalent in corn fields as crabgrass. On average in the United States, .5% of every acre of sweet corn grown is lost to jimson weed infestation. In one acre of corn, that would be 217.8 square feet of loss to jimson weed alone. Typically, just one acre of corn might yield enough jimson weed to afflict an entire community with delirium, hallucinations, and convulsions. The species datura stramonium or jimson weed grows in every county in Massachusetts (“County Distribution of DAST in Massachusetts”).

It is self-evident why Parris would be thinking and commenting about weeds in his sermons: Jamestown weed was being used to bring on the fits of afflicted victims. The effects of jimson weed poisoning were just the type of fire that could be used by Christ’s servants to purge the human weeds out of His garden so the anointed could thrive. The afflicted bodies and minds of Parris’s and Putnam’s first victims (the servant-girls and daughters) would supply the oil for the holy fire that God would use to purge the

unrighteous from their midst. The reason Parris would be using so much plant imagery in his March 27 sermon, “Occasioned by dreadfull Witchcraft broke out here a few weeks

past,” on the parable of the tares in John 6.70, was that the “weeds” were about to be gathered and burned—or in the case of Salem—hanged.

Once the fits had started and the victim was sure she was bewitched, how could the “bewitched” then be made to accuse certain others? A specific person could be singled out and described while the afflicted were in their fits. They could then be asked if that was the person they saw bewitching them. Since such plants of the nightshade family were known to affect the memory adversely, both during and after their fits, the afflicted would be reminded of who they had cried out upon, the specter of the person who had caused the fits, the shape that had tormented them, the same person who had at first been suggested to them. When the fits were over, the bewitched could be reminded of it again and again. It was brainwashing, pure and simple. The result was that the afflicted believed those they accused had tormented them.

People who made easy targets could be accused at first: perhaps those with whom the accusers already had altercations. The afflicted would be made certain that those identified were the people who had bewitched them. The first to be named were those already suspected of witchcraft, or who fit the stereotype of a witch, like Sarah Good and Tituba, or who, like Sarah Osborne, had property disputes with the Putnams (Robinson, 261-63; 267-68). These were powerless individuals nobody important would really miss, the unregenerate—perhaps many folks would even be glad they were gone because they were a nuisance to the community. Then eventually the real targets could be named.

Someone had to be held responsible for allowing Satan a foothold: By dabbling in magic, trying to foretell the future, those now “afflicted” had ultimately succeeded in

raising the devil. The bewitched girls had brought the affliction on themselves and on the community by toying with the unwarrantable. No wonder Satan had attacked them; he had been invited. Cotton Mather, too, suggests that it was these little sorceries that later brought on the more serious visitations of the devil. Although these “Diabolical

Divinations” had been more prevalent all over the “Rest of the World” than they had been in the Country of New-England, God “signalized his Vengeance against these

wickednesses, with such extraordinary Dispensations, as have not been often in others places,” writes Cotton Mather in Pietas in Patriam: The Life of Sir William Phips. He continues,

It is to be confessed and and Bewailed, That many Inhabitants of New- England, and Young people especially, had been Led away with Little

Sorceries, wherein they did Secretly those Things that were not Right against the Lord their God; They would often cure Hurts with Spells, and practice detestable Conjurations with Sieves, and Keys, and Pease, and

Nails and Horseshoes, and other Implements, to Learn the Things for which they had a forbidden and impious Curiosity. Wretched Books had stoln into the Land, wherein Fools were instructed, how to become able Fortune-Tellers: Among which, I wonder that a blacker Brand is not set upon that Fortune-telling Wheel, which that Sham-Scribler, that goes under the Letters of R. B. has proposed in his Delightsfor the Ingenious, as an honest and pleasant Recreation:54 _{And by these Books, the minds of}

‘tis well, if some of them were not betray’d, into what is grosser and more sensible and Capital. (68)

The “R.B.” Mather names was the pseudonym of Nathaniel Crouch,55 and the book to which Mather refers was Delights For The Ingenious, In Above Fifty Select and Choice Emblems, Divine and Moral, Ancient and Modern (London, 1684). The book contained emblems, numbered 1-56 with a lottery wheel at the end of the book with instructions to turn the index

without casting your eyes thereupon to observe where it stayeth, till your hand ceaseth to give it motion; and then look, upon what number it resteth; Then look for the same number among the Lots, which having read it directs you to the Emblem of the same number likewise. (205)

With such a book, children, or anyone, could use the emblems and the lottery wheel to predict fortunes. Someone like Samuel Parris could have used fortune-telling sessions as the book may have inspired an impetus for making the girls participating in such sessions believe they were in danger of bewitchment. Some of the same girls participating in such practices may have been the very ones blamed on opening the door to let in the devil. Samuel Parris may have used such fortune-telling incidents to make the girls believe that they were responsible for their own bewitchment when in reality a drug was responsible.

Nathaniel Crouch had also written the even more sensational and influential Kingdom of Darkness (London, 1688), which was apparently influential in the Salem affair. John Hale tells us that Crouch’s Darkness was among the books most consulted by the Salem Judges (See Burr, Narratives 416 and n.). Darkness, as its full title suggests,

is filled with all sorts of lurid tales of “demons, specters, witches, apparitions, possessions, disturbances, and other wonderful and supernatural delusions, mischevievous feats, and malicious impostures of the Devil” and is adorned with woodcuts illustrating the text, making for great—if provocative—entertainment,

appealing to the imaginations of young people especially. In one account from Crouch’s book a girl under the influence of a witch is described as going out in the fields to gather herbs, and taking them back to the witch, who intends on using them to poison the girl’s mother.

The Witch commanded [the five boys she had conjured] to go along with the maid to a meadow at Wilton, which she shewed in a Glas, and there to gather Vervine and Dill; Forthwith the ragged Boys ran before the Maid, and she followed them to the said Meadow, they looked about for the Herbs and removed the Snow in two or three places before they could find it and at last found some, and brought it away, and returning again to the Witch, the Maid said she found her paring her nails in the Circle; She then took the Herbs and dried some to powder, and the leaves of the rest; threw bread to the Boys and they eat and danced as formerly, and then the witch reading in a Book they vanished. The Witch gave the Maid the powder in one paper, and the leaves in another and the paring of her nails in a third, all which she was to give her Mistress; the powder was to be put in the young Gentlewoman’s drink, or broth to rot their guts in their bellies, the leaves to rub about the brims of the pot to make their teeth fall out of their

heads, and the paring off her nails to make them drunk or mad. (Crouch